Queues and Musings

In which I posit a theory that analytics predicted the issue with queues. First off, the playerbase over time debate. See subscription numbers, vs Expansion dates. Data points for 2014 are in.

There’s always an uptick a few months before an expansion. One measured in millions of players.

Vanilla gained the most players (highest vertical)

BC had continual growth.

WotLK had a great launch and then went flat.

Cataclysm was not favorably seen by the majority of the playerbase and has had the largest drop. There was never an uptick. And this is when you got D3 for free if you subbed for a year…which is the flatline.

MoP had a decent launch but suffered a massive drop that eventually stabilized and had an uptick.

There’s an uptick pattern for WoD.

Specifically for populations on servers.

That said, given that there haven’t been any server closures, there are ~40% less people playing than at peak in WotLK.

Blizzard’s method of merging is called connected realms, which puts two more servers together in order to balance populations.

Stormrage is the Alliance server, Area 52 the Horde one, where the ratios are extreme variants (95:1). PvE specific.

Due to flying since BC, open-PvP in WoW is more or less dead, making PvP servers redundant outside of a) ganking and b) timeless isle. (My thought is that TI was a test base for no-flying in WoD, in particular the PvP implications).

PvE servers are Alliance favored, PvP are Horde.

All this to say that servers have high concentrations of players of a particular faction and that this trend has increased overtime. e.g. Alliance players will tend to move to Alliance heavy servers. It’s a funnel effect.

All that data to say that patterns indicate an uptick of ~1 million players. Those players would be concentrated on a specific set of servers and that those servers are faction-weighted. The “queue cap” if you will, seems to hover around 150,000 players (not absolute but scale), with quite a few servers containing many more players. Actually, it was closer to 100,000 at WoD launch, then was raised over the weekend. Fixed sever sizes and allocations are not feasible with such large swings between the servers.

Dynamic resource allocation (think the Amazon Cloud) is about the only way to manage this type of problem. Connected Realms do a bit of this. Instancing all of WoD does this as well. However, the scale of this instancing has yet to support the servers with > 200,000 players. They have stated that they want to address that this week.

For clarity, this isn’t a hardware issue. It’s a service issue. Building a cloud like service with 10 year old tech ain’t easy. Heck, it’s hard with 1 year old tech. My issue isn’t that the solution is complex, readily agree. My issue is that the evidence rather clearly pointed to this problem (and could address a lot of the population issues) if more efforts were put on it. Though, knowing Blizz, in crunch time they tend to align with polish rather than below water tech. After all, most people will forget about this in 3 months and complain the servers are empty again.

In an ironic twist, this is pretty much what SWTOR has in place, though that game doesn’t have seamless phasing between instances.

SWTOR

From that segue, I completed the Imperial Agent storyline due to the 12 hour queue in WoD. I was pleasantly surprised at the final twists. I thought it was a bit odd for the final decision to be done through proxy and that the choice, while in character, was likely not the one considered canon. I decided to side with the Empire and serve the Sith, rather than intelligence proper. Still, a fun and solid story, by far the best of the bunch so far. And with a better understanding of talents and power, the use of stealth made each mission fly by.

I bought the apartment on DK for 5,000, just to get an idea of what to expect. I’m not poor, with somewhere around 3m across the 4 characters, but decided to hold off the Tatooine investment for now. Placed some items, completed the quest, got some conquest harvesting items too. Looks neat, though it’s more akin to Lego than a freeform service like Wildstar or Rift.

Finally, I decided to try my hand at improving my financial position. That meant emptying the bags on the GTN (auction house). That’s been somewhat fruitful. Looking at the long game though, I wanted to see which tradeskills turned the best profit. Suffice to say that crafting items seems to turn a fair bit less than simply selling the base materials, at least for now. And that the sweet spot of cash making is not in top tier material. In my traditional ways, I have a spreadsheet of all the material I can dig up based on my gathering tradeskills. Some are clearly more profitable than others. So much so that my Sorcerer, while completing some GSI missions on Makeb, ran a few crew skills and has a potential profit of 300,000. My other 55s are all running their own as well, with 2-3 minutes of work setting up about 50,000 each of sales (log on, collect previous skills & GTN, post new items, assign new skills).

I am hesitant to spend any of the credits on temporary items, such as gear, given that the expansion is 2 weeks away. My 140/156 mods are more than enough for now. So for now, I’ll just run crew skill missions and see about getting a Republic character off the ground with the 12x boost.